Doctors working on a clinical trial for treatment of heart disease held back key data, Newsnight has been told.
The Excel trial tested whether stents were as effective as open heart surgery at treating patients with a heart problem called left main disease.
The data suggested more people fitted with stents were dying after three years.
It was eventually published – but only after treatment guidelines that partly relied on the trial had been written.
These guidelines recommend both stents and heart surgery for certain patients with left main disease.
Trial authors defend standards
The authors of the trial said it was carried out rigorously and to accepted academic standards.
In the trial, sponsored by US stent manufacturer Abbott, half the patients were given stents, the other half had open heart surgery.
Not all the patients were recruited at the same time. Some were recruited in 2011, others over the years that followed.
So, when the first results were published in 2016, the doctors doing the trial knew there was data about what had happened to some of the patients five years after their stent or heart surgery procedure.
But they chose to look only at what happened up to three years after the patients' procedures and publish that data.
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